Abstract

Historically, donor insemination (DI) has been characterised by secrecy - and anonymity between donor and recipient and between donor and offspring. Only recently has this dominant orthodoxy been challenged by professional practice and, in some instances legislative reform, enabling the emergence of DI services that facilitate disclosure, information-sharing and the ability of donor-conceived individuals to learn about their donor, including his identity (“donor linking”). Notwithstanding the inherent practical difficulties, anecdotal accounts exist of individuals conceived following anonymous DI who have discovered the identity of their donor and/or located other individuals to whom they are genetically related as a result of DI, although this process has not previously been the focus of in-depth social science inquiry. This presentation reports findings from the first such study with a group of DI-conceived adults who had discovered both the identity of their shared donor and their relatedness to each other (a group that referred to itself as “Clan P”, after the name of their donor).